For the past few decades, our lives have changed in drastic ways. I think no other era has proven to be such a big departure from the one preceding it, than the one we live in today.
The advent of personal computers and the internet has been one of the major reasons for that as they snowballed the digitalisation of human life. The constant increase in computing power, internet speed, battery tech and data storage technology, have all acted as catalysts for the same.
Each of those individual technologies has seen some major breakthroughs over the years. For the purposes of this article, I am going to talk about data storage in particular.
Data storage technology allows us to virtually store our lives and the various aspects of it in the digital realm and serves as the backbone of this information age that we live in.
There have been all sorts of storage media over the years but we are all aware of the mainstream ones that we have used at one or the other point in our lives.
Floppy disks, CDs, DVDs, hard drives, pen drives are the various terms we are all familiar with. While some of these have gone the way of the dodo, some have become the prevalent media of our times.
But these storage media that are cutting edge today, might become obsolete in the foreseeable future. You see, we generate more than 2.5 Exabyte (2.5 billion GB) of data per day and this is only going to keep increasing.
In a not so distant future, there might come a time where we might generate more data than we are capable of storing it. Therefore, we need to look into possible solutions and we might not have to look very far.
DNA forms the building blocks of life itself as it literally contains the blueprint for life. Every single trait that we have is stored in our DNA and this information is passed on for generations to come. It is nature’s way of storing and transferring data.
If we are somehow able to replicate this and start storing our digital data onto DNA, it would be a major revolution in this field and one that will last for a long, long time.
A lot of research is going on to achieve just that with scattered success here and there. In fact, a few months back, researchers were able to store a whole computer operating system, an Amazon gift card and even a movie and some other files into DNA strands. They were also then able to retrieve this information without any errors.
So….why DNA? Well, let me first state a fact. A few kilograms of DNA is enough to store the entirety of data that we have. This alone should be reason enough. But wait, there’s more! The data stored in DNA will last for hundreds of years if stored properly. In my opinion, that makes up for the holy grail of data storage right there.
As with any new technology, storing and retrieving data into DNA is proving to be quite a challenge resulting in exorbitant prices, but that happens with almost any new technology and things are bound to get more efficient, easier and cheaper, as time progresses.
Experts estimate that this technology should be in the hands of the common people in a little over ten years. If you ask me, that is not long at all. In fact, ten years is a relatively short time in the technological landscape.
When this technology finally arrives though, it is anybody’s guess in what form factor we will be using it. Maybe it will be a very tiny device that we will plug into computer systems or maybe one day, we might even carry our own data in our own DNA, using whatever methods imaginable to access it. That would make for a very private and efficient data storage for sure!
